Wadler's Blog

9.2.06

haXe is a language designed by Nicolas Cannasse that compiles into Javascript or Flash. It provides different APIs on client and server, but otherwise provides one of the same advantages as Links, namely, a uniform language for coding on the client and server. It is implemented in O'Caml, and also seems to have a type system similar to that of O'Caml.

Links and haXe have similar goals with regard to client side programming, so there maybe some opportunity to join forces. Links differs from haXe in that it also attempts to address databases, managing session state, and concurrency. Most importantly, Links is trying to be 'as functional as possible', which means that we cannot always easily make use of existing APIs, which tend to be imperative, while haXe imports these essentially unchanged.

By Jeff Jones, Catherine Marshall, and Erik Nilsson. An innovative user study. Maybe useful for Links, where we need to build web applications but will not have many resources for usability. EIRS is the Election Incident Reporting System (EIRS), which was used to monitor recent US elections.